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Lance
A lance is a weapon in NetHack. It is meant to be used while mounted and gives a chance dependent on your lance skill of jousting a monster on a successful attack, granting additional damage, stunning the victim, and often causing it to be pushed back a square if it is not already dead. This will sometimes cause your lance to break. A lance can also be applied to attack two squares away (a knight's jump away or even diagonally if sufficiently skilled). However, there is a to-hit penalty for applying the lance when the wielder is at basic skill level or lower. It is possible to stay a knight's jump away from monsters who are able to throw missiles and use spells and breathweapons to attack them with the lance without them being able to retaliate. Jousting When attacking an adjacent monster in melee with a lance while mounted, there is a chance that you will joust the monster. * You deal an additional 2d10 damage (2d2 if the lance is your secondary weapon). In SporkHack, 2d10 is replaced with 2d(5 + level / 3). * The monster loses all its movement points, and is thus unable to act (again) this turn. * The monster is stunned. This has little effect except making it easier to hit. * The monster is pushed back one space, unless it is too heavy (huge or larger), that space is occupied or deadly (e.g. a lava pool), or it cannot move (e.g. it is trapped). * Your lance has a chance of breaking. Positive luck will greatly reduce this chance. Your lance cannot break when jousting an unsolid monster. Artifact lances will never break (they also don't exist). Enchantment and beatitude do not affect the chance of the lance breaking. Breaking: 1/5 of the time, if rnl(50) (50-1), the lance will break. The rnl is ~2% with 0 luck, and <0.05% with positive luck, but increases rapidly with negative luck. See . Your chance of jousting is determined solely based on your lance skill (the worse of lance or twoweapon if you are using two weapons): : Strategy Jousting can cause your lance to break; as lances are difficult to come by, it will be hard for you to find a replacement should yours break. High luck reduces the chance of breakage. Early in the game, you should probably only apply your lance at range, and switch to another weapon or fall back when opponents close. A deadly jousting tactic is to let the monster close to applying range, then apply the lance on it until it moves adjacent, then hit it normally. Since at high skill levels a joust is nearly guaranteed, the monster will be pushed back for another round of lance thrusts, then will move adjacent again only to be jousted and so on until the monster is dead, usually without ever having an opportunity to attack. With their jumping ability, even low skill Knights in an open space can make particularly good use of the strategy of keeping just enough distance between themselves and an opponent to apply their lance, denying it an opportunity to retaliate. Because jousting robs monsters of their movement points, at high lance skill many single opponents can be readily dealt with simply by repeatedly attacking them in melee with a lance. A successful joust will guarantee you get another turn before they can act. If you are fortunate enough to get jousts on the first action of every game turn, this will immobilize even extremely fast monsters. If the opponent in question is slower than normal speed, such as many of the Named Demons, they are unlikely to get a single turn before you are through with them. Lance skill How skill affects range when applying a lance: ESUSE SXXXS UX@XU SXXXS ESUSE The '@' is where your character is standing. Spaces marked with a 'X' are too close to be hit, spaces marked with a 'U' can be hit even while unskilled, spaces marked with a 'S' can only be hit when skilled, and spaces marked with an 'E' can only be hit when expert. The lance is the only weapon to use lance skill, and there are no artifact lances. Encyclopedia entry References Category:Weapons